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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,537 posts.
Despite it being the first “proper” programming language I learned—by reading K&R front-to-back no less—I don’t write C too terribly often nowadays. Playing resonite has gotten me into writing a load of C# for modding the game, and most of what I do day-to-day is automating the tedium on my computer, which gets…
Due to sheer coincidence of several unrelated tasks converging on Python at work, I recently needed to brush up on my Python skills. So far for me, Python has been little more than a fancy extension language for BeautifulSoup , though I also used it to participate in the recent tradition of writing one’s own static…
Complex queries are hard to read. Literate SQL is about writing queries that are as easy to read as a good novel.
Our FIRST Robotics team struggled with autonomous code for years. Coroutines were the missing piece.
This is an article about compiler directives; or as they are commonly known, pragmas. It’s derived from a talk of a similar name that I gave last year at GopherChina in Shanghai.
“So the site’s pretty simple, all it needs to do is X, Y and Z. You seem like a good programmer so I’m sure it will only take you a few days to put it toge
‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald
Why x^2 isn't always x*x.
What I look for in a code review, from design and duplication to tests, and how I discuss changes with the person who wrote them.
Arthur’s thoughts on coding, software engineering, and other interesting things.
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
Musings on the representation, propagation and handling of errors in existing programming languages, as well as thoughts on future systems. (15K+ words)
My attempt at talking about one of the most underrated features of C#.
Although academic computer scientists have generally dismissed Objectivist-C, it has a zealous following among self-taught programmers and college sophomores.
In this post we’ll explore Haskell’s kind system, the similarities between types and kinds, and show how these can be leveraged to write safer and more reusable code.
Today we’re relicensing the GraphQL specification under the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) v1.0. We think the OWFa is a great fit for…
As an engineer who primarily works with data and databases I spend a lot of time moving data around, hashing it, compressing it, decompressing it and generally trying to shovel it between VMs and blob stores over TLS. I am constantly surprised by how many systems only support slow, inefficient, and expensive ways of…
TinyTapeout VGA 1D Cellular Automata Simulation
A collection of resources to start learning compilers (with a focus on LLVM)
Scaling out operation with read replicas and avoiding the downside of stale reads by observing replication progress.
When I teach courses on Python for scientific computing, I make this point very early in the course, and tell the students why: it boils down to Python being a dynamically typed, interpreted language, where values are stored not in dense buffers but in scattered objects. And then I talk about how to get around this by…
Imagine you are new to Rust and you want to learn some async programming. Writing a chat server is a common way to start, scope is small enough to contain in a blog post, yet it is complex enough to learn most of what you'll need to build async servers in Rust. One DuckDuckGo query and we are off to the races…
A bunch of reasons to write code in 2026
Most undergraduate computer sciences courses teach students about tail call optimization (TCO) , and even if you don't have a formal computer science background the concept is talked about enough that you might be familiar with it anyway, especially if you've ever done any functional programming. However, I think the…
Let's abuse a bug in java.lang.String
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
